PC Gaming Is Dying - Well, Duh!

I was reading an article yesterday over at gamershell.com entitled "PC Gaming is Dying" by Anthony R Brock. I'm not sure when the article was actually posted since it doesn't have a date on it. I found it by clicking through a link on a comment on a slashdot article.

Anyway, Mr. Brock's basic assertion is that game programmers are shying away from the PC as a primary development platform in favor of consoles (Playstation, X-Box, et.al.). While PC games used to be ported to the consoles, the console games are now being ported to the PC.

Brock proclaims that the decision is completely profit driven. "...it is the sole reason the PC is getting crap title after crap title while the console market is seeing record development." I agree with his statement with the singular exception of money being the sole reason.

I say it's also because consoles are a far far easier platform to program for. I guess this could be profit-driven but it's also sanity-driven. Let me explain using Brock's own words. When talking about the reasons there is such an imbalance in console game sales vs PC game sales, he states, "The first [reason] is impatience, and this is partially the fault of PC game developers, who rush their titles out the door without the necessary polish and development time, and thus often take up hours of the end-user's time to even get running at all, to say nothing of the title running properly. I recently sat for three hours troubleshooting Knights of the Old Republic II on my expensive gaming rig, and that was a port of an XBOX game!" No, that's not a fault of the developers at all. That is an inherent flaw in the platform.

Which brings me to my point. I am not a software developer, although I have done some coding in the past, but it doesn't take a developer to see the issue here. When you are developing on a console platform, whichever it may be, you have a fixed set of hardware on which your game must run. You know exactly which BIOS is installed and how to interact with it, you know exactly which CPU is installed, you know exactly which graphics processor is installed and what its capabilities are, you know exactly how much memory the unit has (at least a base level), you know exactly how much memory is allocated to the graphics, you know exactly how the game will be controlled, and you know exactly how many and which output options you have.

When you are developing for the PC, you can use procedure calls in the Windows API to handle all of this for you... in theory. There are certain basic functions, such as making a particular tone squeak out of the sound card, that Windows will gladly handle for you. Unfortunately, there is such a variance in BIOS, CPU, graphics and sound cards and their individual capabilities and limitations, installed RAM, graphics RAM, game controllers (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick, weapons control pad, etc.) and the variance among each of those particular devices, and output options (VGA, DVI, analog, PCM audio, optical audio, etc.) that even Windows can't keep up. This is the same reason so many people are having so much difficulty with Windows Vista (take a look, people are mostly bitching about driver issues and orphaned devices). I mean, which would you rather develop for? A platform that you plug in, test, and if it works your good or one that you have to test and tweak, reconfigure, test and tweak, reconfigure, test and tweak... lather, rinse, repeat? It is simply impossible to test every possible combination. Which is why the consumer might have to spend "three hours troubleshooting" their PC game no matter how much they laid out for their gaming rig.

Yeah, it's economics. Yeah, ports always suck to one degree or another. Get used to it and get over it. I don't think the PC will completely die as a gaming platform. There will always be hard-core enthusiasts like Brock who are also developers. I do think, however, that we are going to see a marked difference in the types of games natively available for the PC vs the console. I think we're already beginning to see it with the likes of Everquest, which Brock mentions in his article, and World of Warcraft.

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p.s. FYI - This is post 666. Just thought that was interesting when I went back to the blogger dashboard.